Room 207 is set in and around a dilapitated building in Hillbrow. For more than ten years, six guys live in room 207 of this block of flats: they are Matome, Molamo, Zulu-boy, D’nice, Modishi and the nameless narrator. By day, they are hustlers – they hustle production companies, they have their own music company, they survive. At night, they party, and they’re pushing corruption, as the narrator would say. They are conmen, and they are streetwise. By day, and by night, women flock around them. Room 207 is a startling novel – the prose is dense and some of it reads like poetry. It paints a vivid, engrossing picture of six friends in Hillbrow, and their sense of hopelessness – despair in fact – of having to compromise their lives. They are artists, these men, but they have to make a living. Otherwise, fate would call them back home – not driving their own BMW, but leaving the way they arrived in the ‘dream city’: in a taxi, with empty pockets, and nothing to show for their years in Joburg.
